102 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
counterinsurgency strategy, in this case against the Seminole towns
in the Everglades. Once again US forces targeted civilians, destroyed
food supplies, and sought to destroy every last insurgent. What US
military annals call the First Seminole War (1817-19) began when
US authorities entered Spanish Florida illegally in an attempt to re
cover US plantation owners' "property": former African slaves. The
Seminoles repelled the invasion. In 1818, President James Monroe
ordered Andrew Jackson, then a major general in the US Army, to
lead three thousand soldiers into Florida to crush the Seminoles and
retrieve the Africans among them. The expedition destroyed a num
ber of Seminole settlements and then captured the Spanish fort at
Pensacola, bringing down the Spanish government, but it failed in
destroying Seminole guerrilla resistance and the Seminoles did not
agree to hand over any former slaves. "Armed occupation was the
true way of settling a conquered country," Senator Thomas Hart
Benton of Missouri said at the time, reflecting a popular blend of
militarism and white-supremacist Christian identity. "The children
of Israel entered the promised land, with implements of husbandry
in one hand, and the weapons of war in the other."17 The United
States annexed Florida as a territory in 1819, opening it to Anglo
American settlement. In l82I Jackson was appointed military com
mander of Florida Territory. The Seminoles never sued for peace,
were never conquered, and never signed a treaty with the United
States, and although some were rounded up and sent in 1832 to
Oklahoma, where they were given a land base, the Seminole Nation
has never ceased to exist in the Everglades.THE MYTHICAL FOUNDATION OF SETTLER PATRIOTISM
Between 1814 and 1824, three-fourths of present-day Alabama and
Florida, a third of Tennessee, a fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and
parts of Kentucky and North Carolina became the private property
of white settlers-all of the land seized from Indigenous farmers. In
1824, the first permanent US colonial institution was established.
First named the Office of Indian Affairs and placed tellingly within
the Department of War, the agency was transferred to the Depart-